Biography

I am very grateful to the Gates Cambridge Trust for their generous financial support of my PhD in Intellectual History. My research centres on eighteenth century debates concerning the sociability of mankind – with a particular focus on questions regarding the foundations of morality and conjectural accounts describing the earliest stages of human development. My intention is to reconstruct this discourse of sociability as a means of reevaluating the philosophical contributions generated by some of the most exciting minds of the Enlightenment. In particular, I will focus on Adam Smith's contribution to these debates by exploring his reading of various 'new systems' of jurisprudence that were devised by continental scholars.